This book offers a theoretical rationale for the emerging presentist movement in Shakespeare studies and goes on to show, in a series of close readings, that a presentist Shakespeare is not an anachronism. Relying on a Brechtian aesthetic of "naïve surrealism" as the performative model of the early modern, urban, public theater, James O’Rourke demonstrates how this Brechtian model is able to capture the full range of interplays that could take place between Shakespeare’s words, the nonillusionist performance devices of the early modern stage, and the live audiences that shared the physical space of the theatre with Shakespeare’s actors. O’Rourke argues that the limitations placed upon the critical energies of early modern drama by the influential new historicist paradigm of contained subversion is based on a poetics of the sublime, which misrepresents the performative aesthetic of the theater as a self-sufficient spectacle that compels reception in its own terms. Reimagining Shakespeare as our contemporary, O’Rourke shows how the immanent critical logic of Shakespeare’s works can enter into dialogue with our most sophisticated critiques of our cultural fictions.

Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy advocates that the beauty of Shakespearean drama is inseparable from its philosophical power. Shakespeare’s plays make demands on us even beyond our linguistic attention and historical empathy: they require thinking, and the concepts of philosophy can provide us with tools to aid us in that thinking. This volume examines how philosophy can help us to re-imagine Shakespeare’s treatment of individuality, character, and destiny, particularly at certain moments in a play when a character’s relationship to space or time becomes an enigma to us. The author focuses on the dramatization of seemingly magical relationships between the individual and the cosmos, exploring and rethinking the meanings of 'individual', 'cosmos' and 'magic' through a conceptually acute reading of Shakespeare's plays. This book draws upon a variety of thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant, in search of a revitalized philosophical criticism of Julius Caesar, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night.

The Ever-Present Now examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary history, some, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism. Through close readings of texts by Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, Insko argues that these writers practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant 'other', but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and linear past, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls 'romantic presentism' insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience-and hence of ethics and democratic possibility.

A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer – broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly – but not exclusively – as regards sexual matters, in the Shakespeare film. The movies chosen for analysis correspond deliberately with those Shakespeare plays that, as written texts, have been subjected to a great deal of productive study in a queer context since the beginnings of queer theory in the early 1990s. Thus the book extends the ongoing queer discussion of these written texts to their counterpart cinematic texts. Queering the Shakespeare Film is a much-needed alternative and complementary critical history of the Shakespeare film genre.

This volume highlights the connections that link both literary discourse and the discourse about literature to the conceptual or representational frameworks, practices, and cognitive results (the ‘truths’) of disciplines such as psychology, medicine, epistemology, anthropology, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric. Literature and the sciences, embedded as they are in specific historical circumstances, thus emerge as fields of inquiry and representation which share a number of assumptions and are determined or constructed by several modes of cross-fertilization. The range of authors examined includes Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Smollett, while emphasis is placed on how authors of literature regard the practices, practitioners and findings of science, as well as on how ‘mimesis’ intersects with scientific discourse. Contributors are Bernhard Klein, Daniel Essig García, George Rousseau, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kate De Rycker, Maria Avxentevskaya, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Mihaela Irimia, Richard Nate, and Wojciech Nowicki.

The second edition of Troilus and Cressida featuring a revised and updated Introduction and new illustrations.